Kaiser-Bunbury et al. (2017)

General information

Data of plant-pollinator interaction networks collected from the island of Mahé, Seychelles, Indian Ocean. The data sheets contain information on a total of 64 monthly networks collected from 8 isolated mountaintop (a.k.a inselbergs) between September 2012 and April 2013. Of the eight study sites, four were restored by removing all exotic plants, and four sites remained unchanged. All flowering plant species were observed each for a total of approx. 3h per network, adding up to a total of 1525h of observations, during which we recorded 581 unique species–species interactions (links) and 12,235 pollinator visits to flowers. We only included data on flower visitors that touched the reproductive parts of the flowers (here referred to as pollinators: bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, birds and lizards) and excluded spiders, barkflies, thrips, springtails, true bugs (hemiptera) and ants.

Data type

Data are available as Excel files in two different formats. Both data sheets contain an interaction matrix with all observed plant species in rows (also those that did not receive any visitors during this time period) and all pollinator species in columns. The following columns are added:

· Treatment – restored and unrestored

· Site – Bernica, Casse Dent, Copolia, La Reserve, Rosebelle, Salazie, Tea Plantation, Trois Frères

· Month – 1 to 8 (September 2012 to April 2013); constitues the entire main flowering season

· Network ID – Indiviual network code consiting of a composite of site and month

· Plant species ID - Code for each plant species

· Floral abundance – the number of flowers per sampling cube for each species in a given network

Values in the cells describing the strength of the interactions between plants and pollinators differs between the two sheets.

1) In the sheet entitled 64 networks_no.visits each cell contains information on the number of visits (= no.visits). These values do not account for different observation times, the number of observed flowers or the total floral abundance of flowering species across the community.

2) In the sheet entitled 64 networks_visitfreq each cell contains information on visitation frequency (=visitfreq). Visitation frequency is a fully quantified and standardised visitation rate, caculated as the number of visits/flower/hour*floral abundance (see source publication for more detailed information). This calculation is necessary as an adaptation to focal observations (in contrast to observations during transect walks). Thus, visitation frequency is the equivalent to the measure of visitation in transect methods as transects are sampled proportional to the numbers of flowers in the community. Pollination webs in Fig. 1 in the source publication were drawn based on visitation rate (number of visits/hour/flower), which can be calculated by dividing visitation frequency by the floral abundance (column F in data sheet) of a given plant species in a network.

Sheets on plant and pollinator species provide taxonomic and origin information on all plant and pollinator species included in the study.

Sources

Kaiser-Bunbury CN, Mougal J, Whittington A, Valentin T, Gabriel R, Olesen JM, Blüthgen N. 2017. Ecosystem restoration strengthens pollination network resilience and function. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature21071a

Data files

Excel format

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